Pyongyang's New Year's present

As Asia ushered in the Chinese New Year with celebrations last month, the North Korean regime announced that it now possesses a nuclear weapon. The announcement came as an unwelcome gift for officials in South Korea and China, who were looking for a little holiday downtime. A nuclearized North Korea is, of course, something our intelligence services have asserted for years, but now Pyongyang has left little room for doubt. North Korea added insult to injury by further announcing its indefinite withdrawal from the six-party talks due to "the Bush administration's increasingly hostile policy."

It was more than just Asian New Year's dinners that were disrupted by Pyongyang's boorish announcement. Pyongyang threw the gauntlet down in front of the main advocates of "incentives" for its promised good behavior. Sunny talk with North Korea was met with bluster. It is time for Beijing and Seoul to reconsider the assistance they shower on a regime that now has nuclear blackmail in its arsenal.

The New Year's announcement is only the latest example of North Korea's slippery strategy. North Korea deceived Seoul in the 1992 bilateral agreement for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, deceived the United States with the 1994 well-intentioned but ill-conceived Agreed Framework accord, deceived inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency before they were unceremoniously expelled, and then finally walked away from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 2003. Pyongyang also deceived both South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, during separate Pyongyang summits, when they innocently trod with Kim Jong Il upon a land that had already secretly gone nuclear.

Nor have North Korea's gifts of deceit been limited to the nuclear sphere, as the Japanese people learned when the remains of abductee Megumi Yokota made their final journey home in November. Megumi was a 13-year-old student when she was kidnapped by North Korean agents operating in Japan and forced to spend the rest of her life living in North Korea teaching Japanese to communist spies. Megumi's family, like so many American MIA families, had long awaited the return of their loved one from North Korea. Imagine their shock when they discovered the remains were not those of their lost little girl. We only hope that our own MIA remains from the Korean War era, for which American recovery teams pay with suitcases full of cash "for logistical support," are more authentic.

There is also Esther Kim of suburban Chicago who has waited for five years for news of her husband. Rev. Dong-Shik Kim disappeared in 2000 along the Chinese border of North Korea. He was last seen with men designated by a Seoul prosecutor's office as North Korean agents. Rev. Kim, like Harriet Tubman, was helping escapees in an underground railroad, in his case North Korean refugees heading out of China. He was repaid with abduction into a North Korean gulag. My colleagues in the Illinois congressional delegation and I recently sent a letter to North Korea's UN ambassador regarding his situation but have gotten no response.

What is the relevance of these examples to ongoing diplomatic efforts to engage North Korea in the six-party talks? Some insist that we pursue Kim Jong Il and beg him to return to the bargaining table. For this loud chorus of critics who chastise the Bush administration for moving with caution in overtures to North Korea, there is a clear lesson. President Ronald Reagan spoke with simple clarity in defining constructive engagement with the former Soviet Union: "Trust but verify." What Reagan prescribed for dealing with the "Evil Empire" proved, in retrospect, to have been the formula for success.

If Pyongyang follows its past negotiating practice of brinkmanship, we can expect a return to the six-party talks once the dust has settled over its nuclear announcement. Pyongyang will likely use its startling recent announcement to grab headlines, intimidate neighbors fearful of a "North Korean bomb" and then find a face-saving rationale to return to the bargaining table. Those seeking unconditional engagement with the North Korean regime, however, must face reality. Forward movement requires the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction because no lesser measure can elicit the international community's trust. Pyongyang must also agree to the cessation of activities that are beyond the pale, including nuclear proliferation, drug smuggling, kidnapping and Pol Pot-style human rights violations. These are not the tactics of a responsible government.

Pyongyang should have no illusions concerning congressional support for normalization of relations until it provides a full accounting of its nuclear activities. This holds true for its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism as well. Pyongyang must cease such terrorist activities as the landing of commandos on the South Korean coast and the reported assassination of a South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok, Russia, both in 1996, if it ever hopes to be accepted internationally. Whether Kim Jong Il and his government can evolve from the unacceptable practices of the past will, in the end, determine whether North Korea has a regime transformation.